Some 30 years ago, longtime West Tisbury resident Harold L. Tinker, bibliophile and retired master of English at the Choate School, wrote a piece for this paper about his town, referring to it as “the loveliest village of the plain” — a phrase from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village. I was a West Tisbury newcomer then, having spent childhood summers at East Chop and given my affections to Oak Bluffs. After all, it was there that I had learned to read in the library, had skipped along the rocks that edged the harbor then, tacked home through the jetties with my brother, John, in his 15-foot catboat after all-day sails, picked blueberries on the unpopulated downs between the Highlands and downtown Oak Bluffs.

About a half-dozen times a summer, my family would pile into the car and go to Gay Head or Menemsha where my father liked to paint watercolors. We would pass through West Tisbury, of course. There was always a stop at Maude Call’s and Ole Borgen’s in North Tisbury for a peach ice cream cone and I would admire the cow that happily grazed under the giant oak tree there. Occasionally, we would swim at Lambert’s Cove or picnic atop Indian Hill. My father, who had known the Vineyard as a child too, would point out the bent trees along the road and tell us that they had been bent that way by the Wampanoags to make a trail in ancient days. There was one shaped just like a horse at the corner of the Christiantown and Indian Hill Roads, and I would always climb onto it for a ride.

My father would tell us, too, how signal fires had been built on top of Indian Hill and my brother and I would clamber up the big boulder that rose there and look out to the ocean that could be seen from it in those days.

But West Tisbury was simply a wayfaring stop on our up-Island journey.

It was an accidental encounter at an East Chop party in the 1960s that made West Tisbury my home. I met West Tisbury poet and First Congregational Church stalwart Dionis Coffin Riggs at the party, at a time when my husband, Tom Cocroft, and I were moving to the Vineyard year-round. My family’s East Chop house was suitable only for summer living, so we had no idea where we would go. The church parsonage across from the Whiting Farm was vacant then and the church was seeking a tenant. Would we like it? Mrs. Riggs asked.

From my bedroom window at East Chop, I could hear the bell buoys clanging on windy nights, and on foggy nights I could hear the West Chop foghorn bellowing mournfully. I could not imagine being on the Island and away from those sounds. But we did move to the West Tisbury parsonage, and soon I was discovering new Island sounds and an altogether new Island.

There was the baaing of Whiting sheep across the road, the neighing of Whiting horses and the crowing of roosters. Whippoorwills called out at night and owls hooted. Sometimes we heard bobwhites. Swans swam in the Mill Pond behind the parsonage. Black ducks, mallards and buffleheads quacked energetically and sometimes we would see playful otters diving early in the morning.

When we moved to West Tisbury, I could not imagine being on the Vineyard and out of sight of salt water. But soon I discovered the woods of beech and black and white oak and sassafras, the green and gold fields of West Tisbury, the fragrant multiflora roses edging them, the undulating stone walls. Down-Island trees were stubbier scrub oak and pitch pine, with an occasional white pine, but the Oak Bluffs downs were the only down-Island wilderness I knew.

We discovered the Tisbury Great Pond where Arnie Fischer Sr. let us cross his Flat Point Farm land to reach the water to go oystering. At South Beach, where The Trustees of Reservations beach is now, the ocean thundered in a far more satisfying way than the wavelets of the Sound did at the foot of the East Chop bluffs.

And then we became acquainted with tales of West Tisbury.

In those days, Willis Gifford, whose father had owned Gifford’s General Store on the West Tisbury-Edgartown Road, and Charlie Foote on Old County Road, were champion storytellers. And there was George Magnuson who remembered rum-running days on the Vineyard.

Today West Tisbury’s champion storyteller is John Alley, along with Cynthia Riggs, who writes Island mysteries that are solved by Victoria Trumbull, a nonagenarian sleuth fashioned after her mother, Dionis.

Of course in the four decades in which I have now called West Tisbury home, there have been many changes. In those early years, the population was under 400. Police chief George Manter gently watched over it with one assistant. Now the population is over 3,000 and the year-round police force is nine. Then I knew virtually everyone in the village. Now West Tisbury is a full-fledged town and I know mainly my neighbors on Music street, where I now live at the back of a brown-gold field. The street was named for the pianos the sea captain residents brought home for their daughters to play on.

On our first day in the parsonage, we found a pail of oysters on the steps — a welcome to the village from Lloyd Mayhew.

I tend, I suppose in an old-fogey way, to wish that there weren’t quite so many West Tisbury summer events now bringing crowds — the Farmers’ Market and the Artisans’ Fairs and the antiques auctions and art gallery openings. I don’t like giant tour buses and oversized trucks knocking the limbs off the trees that bend so gracefully above Music street. I wish the Mill Pond was as deep as it used to be.

All the same, Hal Tinker was right. West Tisbury remains in my eyes the loveliest village of the plain — and of the Vineyard.